Under the Wonderful

Under The Wonderful MIKE FINLEY 1 Under The Wonderful Mike Finley Kraken Press St. Paul 2016 2 Contents I Fall In Love Too Easily.................................................... 6 Under The Wonderful ..................................................... 7 Last Minneapolis Bear ..................................................... 8 Plebiscite of the Grass ................................................... 10 ‘Once Upon a Time’ .......... Error! Bookmark not defined. Bigly ............................................................................... 15 The Angels of Gomorrah ............................................... 16 Let’s Put Out The Sun .................................................... 17 In Passing ...................................................................... 18 Minnesota State Fair ..................................................... 19 Freeport ........................................................................ 20 Cafe Extempore ............................................................. 22 When You Love Someone ............................................. 23 The Poodle Who Wished To Be A German Shepherd .. 25 Best Car Radio I Ever Had .............................................. 26 The Tissue ..................................................................... 28 The Reading of Jack Kerouac’s Will ............................... 29 God Drives a Caterpillar D11 ......................................... 31 I Heard Her Call My Name ... ......................................... 32 Hyperactive Landlord .................................................... 33 At The Koin-O-Kleen on Chicago Avenue ...................... 34 Picnic At Lascaux ........................................................... 35 The Kindly Cannon ........................................................ 37 3 God's Body .................................................................... 38 Stooping to Pick Up a Pill … ........................................... 40 Is There NASCAR in Heaven? ........................................ 41 Staples ........................................................................... 42 Aphorism ....................................................................... 43 Peggy Palmer ................................................................ 44 Five Thirty In The Morning ............................................ 45 Poetry Magazine Editors ............................................... 46 The Thing Writers Never Learn, Or Anyone Else For That Matter ........................................................................... 49 Alongside Beggar’s Creek .............................................. 51 Stacked Up .................................................................... 52 Richard Fariña ............................................................... 53 Profound Imbecile ......................................................... 55 The Man Who Thrived on Refusal ................................ 56 How To Turn Bad Things Good ..................................... 57 For Robert Plant On My 66th Birthday ......................... 58 Poetry: The Big Nothing ................................................ 60 The Man With No Arms And No Legs ........................... 63 Permutations of n things taken r at a Time .................. 64 Can A Poet Lock His Pickup Up? .................................... 66 A Concise History of Poetry .......................................... 67 The Ridge Road ............................................................. 69 What The Goldfish Wants To Know .............................. 71 4 The Sign In The Flaming Store Window ........................ 72 Walking With a Friend By the River in Winter .............. 74 Old Strip Mall, Lorain .................................................... 75 Two Fathers, Two Sons ................................................. 76 The Prevalence of Mystery in Everyday Life ................. 77 My Old Man .................................................................. 78 Cup of Old Pens ............................................................. 79 Success .......................................................................... 80 We Think We Invented Wondering .............................. 82 Great Stuff ..................................................................... 83 The Woman On Level 5-North ...................................... 87 The Gall ......................................................................... 89 There Are Bargains If You Look ..................................... 90 Irish Weeds ~ A Found Poem ........................................ 91 Runner ........................................................................... 93 When the Moon Looks Down Upon Us ........................ 94 Hand On Knee ............................................................... 95 5 I Fall In Love Too Easily Often, over a counter in a store -- Suddenly I get a glimpse of your consciousness -- bright, generous, and eager to laugh -- rubbing up against my consciousness -- your wonderful point of view smacking just for a moment against my point of view -- like suns colliding -- touching off significant ramifications -- and I walk out into the street indifferent to traffic -- heart singing, eyes spinning, spine quaking -- and I go home and write a score of poems on the feeling I am having -- rich, ebullient, overcome with love -- feeling every possible emotion, including safety, knowing no one will ever know. 6 Under The Wonderful You meet the person you have been waiting for for ever and not only are you excited but you see the excitement in them, in the color of their cheeks and the way you weave your anxious fingers together. It is like a store finally stocks the thing you've been wanting and you sweep every item off the shelf and you ask the clerk if there are any more in the back. You could be walking the road when the feeling overtakes you and you start skipping faster than you can run and it seems downhill because you can't slow down and it's night and every star is fixed on you, look, the stars are streaming down your face. 7 Last Minneapolis Bear by Mike and Daniele Finley, 1993 We can call her Sally but she doesn’t have a name. She was born near Savage but has lived in the city for twenty six years. She walks at night and is never sighted by day. The only people who see her scouring the alleys are drunks and the homeless and couples under streetlights. The cops don’t know, they stuff themselves with sandwiches in their squad cars, They never see shadows slouching through the dark. When you hear a cat screech, or a dog sound out from behind a fence, She is there, bounding down the boulevards. She walks on grass to avoid leaving footprints. She knows to let the dumpster lids down softly. She checks screen doors to find ones that are unlocked. Lit in floodlights, she snatches northerns from the spillway at St. Anthony. She drags a burlap bag of oatmeal across the Stone Arch Bridge. She pads through the jungle along the Mississippi, 8 And swims across the narrows under the Interstate in the dark. She checks the truck dock at Cub Foods for the day’s old vegetables. Huffing and galumphing she makes her way to the mushroom caves That were worship centers years before, before the railroad companies blew them up. But they left one corridor intact -- inside the cave the bear spreads out her takings for the two young cubs. We can call her Sally, but Sally’s not her name. 9 Plebiscite of the Grass The grass demanded that a vote be held. "I think we have all been buffaloed," said one blade. "All this talk of terror! Our leaders have deceived us into being fearful of this enemy! Who among us has witnessed a single act of terror?" The rest of the grass tried to remember, but memory has never been a strength of grass. And the leadership made no effort to defend itself. They could not remember either. "If we throw off the shackles of fear," said the blade, "we will have a mandate to grow, to seed, to be all that we can be -- are you with me?" The grass cheered and stood straight and tall, proud to be grass on a day filled with sunshine. No one noticed the distant sound of a motor being cranked. 10 Paraphrase Once upon a time … you sure were well-dressed, And you liked slipping the homeless guy a five in your prime, didn't you? People would say, "Look out doll, the way you’re going you're heading for a fall." But you figured everyone was just teasing you. You used to laugh back then at all the people that were hanging out. Now you don't talk so loud, eh? You don't seem so proud now, somehow, at least not in my opinion – Scrounging the sofa cushions for lunch money. How does it feel? That’s right, I’m asking you how it feels, To like not have a home, to not be known by anybody – Down the road, end-over-end, like some kind of Indiana Jones downhill-rolling stone? We understand you went to one of the better schools, Miss Lonely But all you ever did there was get juiced in it. Nobody explained to you how to live out by the curb And now look at you, you seem to have gotten pretty used to it. You said you'd never compromise with that Mysterious Tramp, but hey – 11 You’re starting to realize – that that Tramp’s not peddling alibis And you gaze into the black hole of his eyes And you clatter to your knees and you beg like a doll, Hey Please Mister Tramp, please let’s us make a deal! How does that feel? Close your eyes and explain to everyone how it feels to be you, To be all by yourself, to be all solitary

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